The Kraken King by Meljean Brook Read Free Book Online

months,” he said. “Yours isn’t the first airship they’ve destroyed.”
    “Oh.” The reply seemed uncertain—as if she wondered whether to apologize for suggesting that he should have easily found them before now. He preferred the question she asked, instead. “What did they take from the others?”
    “Nothing.”
    “Nothing? I don’t understand. Were the ships all French, then, and the marauders at odds with them?”
    “No.”
    “Westerners? Naval ships?”
    He shook his head. “Smugglers, merchants, miners, and travelers.”
    “ Passenger ships? ” Sharp astonishment softened to confusion. “What did they have in common?”
    “They were all airships.”
    “And men on flyers destroyed them?”
    “Yes.”
    “That doesn’t make any sense. What purpose could the destruction serve? Crippling an enemy, perhaps. But it doesn’t sound as if there is one enemy.” Her voice had dropped, as if she were speaking to herself rather than to Ariq now—until she asked another question. “What could the motivation be?”
    Ariq grinned into the wind. He hadn’t expected an interrogation. But although her questions were the same that others had asked over the months, he liked that they came so quickly.
    And though his gratitude made little sense, now his attraction did. It was not just his boiling blood; she was not just hands and legs and breasts. She also possessed humor and an agile mind. Those both made the sensation of her body against his more enjoyable—and he no longer forced himself to ignore how she felt. He allowed himself to wonder whether she was bare between her legs.
    Then she said, “Perhaps it’s a diversion to make everyone turn their attention here, while their true target lies elsewhere,” and Ariq realized what a careless fool he’d been.
    Her first questions had taken an expected route—straightforward. Most people thought in the same way, in a direct line between cause and effect. When they learned of an attack, they assumed the motivation was money or enmity. A simple explanation. Even when their motivations were hidden, their schemes took direct steps: If a man wanted to make a woman jealous, he paid attention to another woman. Most people never stepped sideways. But the woman behind him did. Easily, too, as if it had been no effort for her to imagine an indirect cause for the attacks.
    Not just an indirect cause, but a logical one.
    A woman who plotted. She might not pose a threat to Ariq or his town. But he would take more care until he was certain she didn’t.
    “Nobody’s eyes would turn in this direction,” he said.
    There were smugglers’ dens festering to the south and a few mining towns to the north, all built with the approval of local aboriginal tribes. Fujimaru had been searching for the marauders, but only because the ironship’s commander was a friend of Ariq’s. No one else gave a damn about the settlements here.
    Except for the rebellion. They’d funded their war against the Golden Empire by smuggling technology and selling it to the west. Destroying the smugglers’ dens would strike a great blow to the rebels.
    But the Khagan’s armies would never attack so indirectly—or use flyers of Nipponese design. And they would have no reason to attack a French ship.
    “ Your attention turned this way,” she said.
    “Yes.”
    “Why?”
    “My people have been among those killed.”
    She nodded. “So if these attacks won’t draw defensive forces away from another location, the diversion might be in the number of airships attacked. The marauders could conceal their true target by destroying many.”
    “Yes.”
    “You’ve thought of that already.”
    Yes. But until this woman, no one else he’d spoken with had. “Each airship could have been targeted for any number of reasons. So far, not one seems more important than any other.”
    “And our airship?”
    “You would know better.” Ariq couldn’t trust her not to lie again, but he wanted to hear her